Mona Awad’s writing, teaching is nothing short of fearless
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From the beginning, Mona Awad was often consumed by the fear of imperfection in her writing. Years later, Awad is a decorated writer and uses her knowledge of the writing process to teach young writers.
“I’m very, very sensitive to all of the kinds of anxieties and goals and hurdles and challenges that young writers might face because I’ve faced them myself,” Awad said. “I speak from a place of experience.”
Awad is an author and assistant professor in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. Her first book was a collection of short stories titled, “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” published in 2016.
Since then, she’s expanded her writing to encompass horror and fantasy. Her second book, “Bunny,” was voted Best Book of the Year by TIME, Vogue and the New York Public Library. Her newest book “Rouge,” published in September 2023, includes characters reflective of her own lived experience.
Awad started writing personally in a college creative writing class. She began with poetry, but she dropped the class and was scared out of writing for several years.
Her poetry felt so important to write that she had trouble writing it. She ended up pursuing journalism, then eventually returned to creative writing and earned a master’s degree in English.
“It wasn’t until later that I just missed writing so much, writing fiction especially, (so) I moved from poetry to fiction,” Awad said. “I had this idea in the back of my head for a long time for a book, and I finally decided to start getting back into it.”
Writing has always been intimate for Awad. From battling the importance of her product, it’s also extremely personal with a strong urge for every word to be perfect.
While writing her first book, “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” she was overwhelmed with how much she had to say and worried she didn’t have the talent or ability to properly convey the message.
At SU, Awad said her teaching is reflective of her writing. Her primary classes outside of Master of Fine Arts writers’ workshops are about fairy tales and horror. Both Kevin Jiang and Max Delsohn are third-year MFA students and have taken several of Awad’s classes, returning because of her caring and dedicated teaching style.
Delsohn, an ex-comedian, describes Awad’s writing as incredibly funny, combining many different writing styles in her fiction. As a student in several of her classes, he said Awad leans into the ways that humor is linked to fiction, incorporating literary and satirical aspects, Delsohn said.
“She knows she’s a good enough and confident enough writer to know all those things can exist at once,” Delsohn said. “I was really excited to take a class with somebody who quite literally wrote the book on all the ways that MFA programs can be this weird, specific world.”
A recurring theme in Awad’s writing is the feeling of being understood. After reading her books, the reader is less alone. “Bunny,” specifically, embodies what it’s like to be a college student. The reader can escape to an entirely different place and experience the story with her, said Victoria Lafarge, a junior studying English and Textual Studies and Television, Radio and Film.
“She’s the whole package – teacher, writer, scholar, mentor – I feel that she brings all that into the classroom,” Jiang said.
By experiencing her own fear and anxiety of imperfection around her own writing, Awad allows for a space for young writers to express themselves without fear, Jiang said. This quality is what makes her such an amazing teacher – she’s honest about her praise and critique without being harsh.
“She’s not afraid to tell the truth. She’s not afraid to talk about envy or really intense anger (in her writing),” Jiang said. “I think it’s refreshing in that sense. It helps me access and confront and work with those things, those feelings, or states within myself.”
Awad uses her life to comfort others, showing how, while fantastical, the parts of us that may be the scariest also create something beautiful.
“The books I love the most are the books that make me feel less alone after I’ve read them,” Jiang said. “That’s the feeling her books give to me, just that comfort of feeling like wow, I’m not the only one here.”
